Mission Moment

Then the kingdom of heaven will be like this. Ten bridesmaids took their lamps and went to meet the bridegroom. Five of them were foolish, and five were wise. When the foolish took their lamps, they took no oil with them; but the wise took flasks of oil with their lamps. As the bridegroom was delayed, all of them became drowsy and slept. 6 But at midnight there was a shout, “Look! Here is the bridegroom! Come out to meet him.” Then all those bridesmaids got up and trimmed their lamps. The foolish said to the wise, “Give us some of your oil, for our lamps are going out.” But the wise replied, “No! there will not be enough for you and for us; you had better go to the dealers and buy some for yourselves.” And while they went to buy it, the bridegroom came, and those who were ready went with him into the wedding banquet; and the door was shut. Later the other bridesmaids came also, saying, “Lord, lord, open to us.” But he replied, “Truly I tell you, I do not know you.” Keep awake therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour.
--Matthew 25:1-13

Dear Covenant Families,

The church is perched in a precarious place: a middle place of faith and hope. Christ the Incarnate Lord has already come. This is the message of Christmas. But we are waiting for the promised fulfillment of his second coming, when he establishes truth and justice and makes all things new. Every year, every December, we are meant to enter imaginatively into the minds and hearts of the people of God before the first Christmas—people who believed in a coming Messiah, but who could only imagine who he would be, what he would say or do.

We’re like them, like the bridesmaids in the parable above. We know the bridegroom, and we’ve been invited to his wedding feast. We know that the feast begins soon, but we do not know the day or the hour. God has his own timing; and if the first Advent provides any clues about the second, then we can say only one thing for sure: It’ll be unexpected. No one—literally no one—thought that the Messiah would be the apparently illegitimate son of a carpenter in Nazareth, born among barn animals and sleeping in a feeding trough, or that he would grow up to be a homeless itinerant preacher. No one thought he would be executed by the Roman governor of Palestine after being found guilty of sedition against Rome and blasphemy against the God of Israel.

Whatever the second Advent will be—whatever Christ looks like, whatever means he chooses to bring about justice and peace—we must remember the simple fact that our God works in mysterious ways.

I sometimes get tired of waiting. I’m wearied by my own sins, by the sins and faults and injustices of the culture around me and by the suffering we witness every day around the world. Sometimes I find myself asking with the tailor from The Fiddler on the Roof: Wouldn’t this be a good time for Messiah to come?

The disciples seem to have thought Jesus would return in their lifetimes. He had told them to get ready, after all—that he would return soon. But God’s “soon” is not the same as our “soon.” In our time of waiting, as we hold out hope for the surprising and world-altering event that is the second coming of Christ, we do well to remember that Christians have been eagerly anticipating his coming for 2,000 years already. Christ may surprise you or me today with a face-to-face encounter. And if he does, we’ll ask the obvious question, the question of the disciples in the boat in the midst of the storm: “Lord, where have you been? We are perishing!”

He may, instead, grace our planet with his second coming—with perfect justice and peace, and with the new heavens and the new earth—1,000 years from now, or 10,000, or 10 million. A thousand years are for him as a day. The year of our Lord 2024 may be one of the earliest days of the early church. Perhaps we have a lot more growing up to do, a lot more aging before he makes all things new. Who is to know?

When the first advent occurred, precious few people recognized the Son of God in their midst; most rejected him. Our task is to prepare our hearts and minds so that we do not make the same mistake. When he comes, will he find us waiting? More to the point—will we be the sort of people who recognize him, who know him, and who are glad to see him? Will we have sufficient oil in our lamps to join his wedding procession—or will we be found unprepared, our hearts and minds preoccupied with other things? Now, in the darkest time of the year, when days are short and the air is cold, we get ready, preparing the way for the coming of the Lord. We are faithful in prayer, patient in our hope. We proclaim the gospel; we decry injustice; we make peace wherever we can. We speak the truth in love.

We fill our lamps with oil. And we wait.

Non Nobis,

Christopher D. Schmidt
Rhetoric School Head